1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to education and guidance of users of computing devices, and more specifically to an automatic comparison and evaluation of methods followed by various users to fulfill an identical goal and the determination of most effective method.
2. Description of Prior Art
With the advent of computers and embedded devices and the incredible growth of the number of personal computer users, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to teach users the most efficient ways of interacting with the software applications running on the various hardware platforms.
Currently, to familiarize themselves with the workings of the application components, the computer users may read an invariably weighty User""s Manual book, purchase and view a videotape on the subject, take a class, or as commonly done, simply start using the application referring to the application""s Help subsystem when necessary.
None of the instances above, are guaranteed to teach a novice or an expert user the most optimal sequence of steps to perform a task. Additionally, considering the sheer volume of new and presently used computer applications being offered for sale and use, i.e., over Internet, every month, a way is needed to teach the users how to operate those applications.
What is needed is a system to inform computer users of the most efficient way to perform individual application tasks and functions.
The inventive educational system monitors all user actions when they interact with applications being executed on devices such as personal computers, laptop, palmtops, controllers, telephones, etc. The system measures and computes the number of steps or actions that are applied by the user to achieve some result, such as mouse clicks and keyboard strokes used for finding and opening of files, sending of an email, a broadcast message and for telephone dialing to connect to Internet or to talk to a person. Additionally, other factors such as the amount of distance a mouse was dragged in a step, a type of input entry in the step taken, e.g., mouse click, keyboard entry, and/or pull down menu selection are considered in computing the most optimal sequence of steps for performing a task. The computations are then stored, for example on a disk or in memory of the device.
The stored results are compared to those of other users, to determine whether different users are applying different number and types of actions to achieve the same goal, e.g., opening a file. From each of the results, a most optimal approach is determined and a description of the most optimal approach is then sent to the less skillful users.
The inventive educational monitoring system interprets user actions and ascertains, when identical tasks are performed by users through the use of a semantic module described in a commonly owned, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/078,807 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,968, entitled xe2x80x9cSleep Prevention Dialogue Based Car Systemxe2x80x9d, filed on May 14, 1998, the whole contents disclosure of which are incorporated herein by reference. A counting module is used to split user actions into sub-steps, classify these sub steps, and to measure complexity of actions in terms of the complexity of chains of the sub step classes. For example, a value one (1) may be assigned to such steps as clicking a mouse button, hitting a key on a keyboard etc., thus a complexity of a user action to open some file would be a number of hits and clicking that a user spent to find and open a file.
As an example, please consider a situation where two users of an identical system are performing a file open command. One user may type a name of the file to open it, another user may find the name of the file in a special window and click on it. Based on the evaluation described above, if the system determines that the second user is more efficient, the first user will be notified and/or guided through the more efficient steps to take for achieving the file open. The notification and guidance may be in a form of a pop-up menu displayed on the first user""s screen and describing the steps as taken by the second user. The notification and guidance also may include one or more graphical feedbacks such as highlighting of icons, menu tool bars, and other window objects to guide the first user to the optimal steps.
The strings of actions having least complexity are then stored in a central educational database, and are used as referenced prototypes for comparison with other user actions. If the same operation is later determined to be performed more efficiently, the new, more efficient string of actions is then stored in a database. Furthermore, the referenced prototype of string actions may be introduced in the database by the human experts.